Recently, liquid crystal displays (LCDs) have become immensely popular as a big monitor screen for a TV receiver (which will be simply referred to herein as a “TV”).
Those LCDs for use as a big monitor screen for a TV include a so-called “VA mode LCD” that uses a vertical alignment liquid crystal layer (see Patent Document No. 1, for example).
A conventional VA mode LCD has different gamma curves, representing a grayscale-luminance characteristic, when viewed from a frontal viewing angle (i.e., when viewed along a normal to the monitor screen) and when viewed from an oblique viewing angle (i.e., when the polar angle is greater than zero degrees). And as the transmittance at an oblique viewing angle becomes higher than at the frontal viewing angle, the image may look whitish or excessively bright (which is sometimes called a “whitening phenomenon”) at the oblique viewing angle. A “multi-picture element” technique is one of various means for suppressing such a whitening phenomenon at an oblique viewing angle. According to the multi-picture element technique, one picture element is divided into two or more sub-picture elements that have mutually different luminances and a grayscale is represented by those two or more sub-picture elements. The multi-picture element technique is also called a “picture element division” technique or an “area grayscale” technique. The multi-picture element technique is disclosed in Patent Documents Nos. 2 and 3, for example, the entire disclosure of which are hereby incorporated by reference.    Patent Document No. 1: Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 11-242225    Patent Document No. 2: Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2004-062146 (corresponding to U.S. Pat. No. 6,958,791)    Patent Document No. 3: Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-55896    Patent Document No. 4: Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-270614